SaaStr

MAY 8, 2022

SaaStr 552: 5 Lessons on Building Your Sales Organization for Scale with Than Hancock, EVP of Sales @ Podium and Carlie Adams, Head of West Coast Sales @ Podium. From Burn-Out to $100M in ARR with Jason Cohen, Founder of WP Engine. When to Go Multi-Product in SaaS. The Only 2 Things That Really Motivate a Salesteam.

Scale 221

Scale Engineering Payment Features Sales 221

SaaStr

APRIL 25, 2023

In last week’s Workshop Wednesday , President Sales & Field Engineering Chris Donato and SVP Business Development & Ecosystem Shelli Vivona shared how to scale out a go-to-market org. Celonis started 12 years ago in Germany and recently began its move into the U.S. This has resulted in amazing hypergrowth.

Scale 174

Scale VP of Engineering Sales Hiring Engineering 174

SaaS Brief Submitted Articles

OCTOBER 10, 2022

The role of a Solution Engineer is pivotal to the success or demise of a sales opportunity, therefore needs to be elevated and supported beyond the norm.

Engineering 130

Engineering Sales 130

SaaStr

APRIL 7, 2024

So just a little while back, Lenny Rachintsky had me on his hyper-popular podcast to talk about scaling sales, from the perspective of a founder who hasn’t really done sales. They really are a great checklist when you are starting to scale sales in SaaS: #1. And sales go down, not up. #2. It’s a tough job.

Sales Hiring 237

Sales Hiring Scale Headcount Sales 237

Sales Hacker

JULY 25, 2022

In order for your car to run efficiently, you need every part of your engine firing on all cylinders. Everyone on your team must meet their specific goals in order for your engine to operate efficiently. Here’s the thing about driving a car — and about running a sales org: Bumps in the road are inevitable.

Sales Recruiting 99

Sales Recruiting Engineering Revenue Sales Enablement 99

SaaStr

OCTOBER 12, 2020

SaaStr favorite Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures was gracious enough to sit down with Nick Caldwell, former CPO of Looker and current VP of Engineering at Twitter. Nick has vast experience when it comes to B2B and B2C, which is why we asked them to share their best tips for growing product and engineering orgs from 0 to IPO.

Engineering 219

Engineering Part-Time VPE Scale B2C 219

SaaStr

JULY 5, 2022

By moving from Freemium to “Contact Me” only (albeit with transparent pricing), sales went way, way up. And they probably needed to do this, to get the revenue engine going. So many sales leaders get frustrated with Free editions, very low-cost editions … and the Long Tail in general. But it supports them.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Engineering Acquisition 284

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 29, 2024

If a sales exec makes it anything but effortless to schedule a job interview with them, Basically it won't work out — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin  ?? At least for sales execs, never hire them if they are slow in the recruiting process. Recruiting is sales. But for in-bound candidates? Probably, even slower.

Sales Recruiting 196

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Interviewing Sales 196

Andreessen Horowitz

JULY 12, 2022

Sales enablement —the strategic use of people, processes, and technology to improve sales productivity and increase revenue — is the (usually) missing key for sales organizations that want to evolve beyond a handful of overachievers and into a well-oiled, agile, and high-performing commercial machine.

Sales Enablement 89

Sales Enablement Engineering Enterprise Sales 89

Intercom, Inc.

APRIL 4, 2022

One of the joys of an engineering career is how varied it can be – the size, industry and above all culture of any company entirely determines what an engineering job actually looks like on a day to day basis. I’ve been a Product Engineer at Intercom for just over two years. Joining Intercom.

Engineering 118

Engineering Scale Sales Hiring Company Culture 118

SaaStr

DECEMBER 19, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What are the signs that an enterprise SaaS startup is ready to scale by hiring more sales people? For a higher-velocity, in-bound driven SaaS product, most sales reps will have trouble processing more than 50 or so truly qualified leads a month. Before $10m ARR or so, more qualified leads = more sales. To a point.

Scale 260

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales 260

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 20, 2024

Gusto is a high-velocity, high-scale acquisition and expansion engine, and one we can all learn from. To be even more specific, Gusto realized the word “territory” was holding their sales team back. Today, many SaaS companies still divide up sales accounts in territories by city, country, or region, or round-robin them by rep.

Scale 202

Scale Sales Marketing Construction 202

Zuora

OCTOBER 22, 2020

The post Meet Katherine Travis, Sales Engineer & Z-Awesome Winner appeared first on Zuora. Every quarter we recognize exceptional ZEOs with our peer nominated “Z-Awesome Award.” These individuals are entrepreneurial, creative and truly embody […].

Engineering 98

Engineering Sales 98

SaaStr

JANUARY 18, 2023

Dear SaaStr: What’s a Good Benchmark for B2B Sales Cycles? To overgeneralize, but to give you a pretty rough sense: Sales cycles are very much impacted by the intent of the prospect. Once you have a bit of an engine going though: Deals < $2,000 in ACV should close on average within 14 days. appeared first on SaaStr.

Benchmarks 278

Benchmarks B2B Sales Engineering 278

Neil Patel

JANUARY 11, 2021

The following are 40 advanced and alternative search engines that you can use to find just about anything on the Internet. To start off our search adventure, let’s look at some general search engines beyond the top three — Google, Bing , and Baidu. Looking for a search engine based on computation and metrics?

Engineering 144

Engineering Entertainment Trends Technology 144

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2023

Dear SaaStr: How Many Sales Reps Do I Need? You can back into how many sales reps you’ll need in SaaS. Your VPs and Directors of Sales and sales ops and rev ops leaders and sales engineers are cost centers here. Assume 1 sales manager for each 8 sales professionals. 60% is OK, too.

Scale 242

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 242

SaaStr

JUNE 7, 2020

“From Burn-Out to $100M in ARR with Jason Cohen of WP Engine” This SaaStr classic shares how Jason, a repeat founder, got to $100m ARR. 8: “How to Design a Sales Comp Plan to Get You to $100M” Few things are more complicated in practice than getting a sales comp plan and sales incentives just right.

Engineering 164

Engineering Sales Hiring Education Cloud 164

SaaStr

DECEMBER 23, 2022

But would you be surprised to learn that it takes an average B2B sales team two days to respond to a lead? Track how long leads are routed to the sales team – and if it takes hours or even days, move to fix that process. Consider lead scoring: identifying your top leads and ensuring your sales team follows up with them quickly.

Scale 164

Scale Engineering Marketing Scaling 164

SaaStr

MAY 13, 2022

Tracy Kraft, VP of Global Revenue Marketing at Demandbase, breaks down her strategy for building successful revenue marketing engines for large multinational companies and small startups. ” It’s essential for marketing to work in sync with sales and other departments, such as customer service and pre-sales.

Revenue 215

Revenue Scale Engineering Marketing 215

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 25, 2020

Analysts and product managers and sales operations teams deploy Tableau, Power BI, Looker, Superset, and many other tools to parse their data. There needs to be a layer between them to make all that data accessible to these users - a data lake engine. At the same time, the BI landscape has blossomed. That’s Dremio.

Engineering 228

Engineering Data Azure Data Analysis 228

SaaStr

APRIL 15, 2024

In SaaS at least, I’ll give you one metric that is fairly reliable: How many dedicated sales professional do they have, just 100% selling the competitive product? If you can find > 20 or so sales reps selling it on LinkedIn, then your BigCo is taking it Seriously. If not, and it’s a sales-driven space … they aren’t.

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Engineering Metrics Sales 265

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2020

Then, once you know how to do it yourself, you hire 2 sales reps. More on that here: When You Hire Your First Sales Rep — Just Make Sure You Hire Two | SaaStr. After you have 2 reps hitting quota, you hire a head of sales. But if your hire the VP of Sales before that, you are asking them to figure out product-market fit.

Sales Hiring 246

Sales Hiring Scale Sales Management 246

Chart Mogul

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

In 2021, ChartMogul experienced a transformative shift in data strategy when we introduced a dedicated data engineering team. Updating the data engineering stack streamlined data processing; reducing the time and effort invested in manual data handling.

Engineering 52

Engineering K8S orchestration (Kubernetes) Data AWS 52

SaaStr

JULY 25, 2021

Your VPs and Directors of Sales and sales ops leaders and sales engineers are cost centers here. Assume 1 sales manager for each 8 sales professionals, and 1 head of sales development for each 10 SDRs. Fifth, the more specialized the sales process is, the more folks you’ll need. 22 heads /.75

Scale 287

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 287

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 26, 2021

Brendon Cassidy, my VP of Sales wrote a version of this piece a while back. I though an updated version of this would be good for founders thinking about hiring a VP of Sales … VPs of Sales themselves … and VPs-to-be to read — Jason, ed. … 10 Rules to Being a VP of Sales in a Startup.

Sales Hiring 286

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Startup Sales 286

SaaStr

JULY 3, 2022

Q: Dear SaaStr: Is It Worth Working as a Sales Rep? Being a sales rep is the hardest job that almost anyone can get and at least try to do. What management is like (sales requires managers. How hard sales is. But — most smart folks can find an entry level sales job. Absolutely. Boy, you will learn.

Sales 214

Sales Engineering Management 214

SaaStr

JULY 26, 2021

Q: Dear SaaStr: Should a Startup Founder Handle Sales Themself When First Getting Started? The “best” sequence for building a repeatable sales engine is roughly: The CEO/founder should close at least the first 10 (or 20 or whatever) customers. It’s to scale a tiny engine into something bigger. That way, she knows.

Sales Hiring 265

Sales Hiring Scale Startup AWS 265

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

Everything from hiring on the GTM side to layering in a sales-led motion into PLG. Let’s dive into what’s making that hybrid model successful: PLG and Sales Led? Given this, you must understand the role that each facet of the business plays in promoting that product, from marketing and sales to customer service.

Scale 251

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Marketing 251

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 6, 2021

The other day Brendon Cassidy, the first head of sales at LinkedIn and the first VP of Sales at $10B Talkdesk, Adobe Sign / EchoSign, and more — and now co-CEO of Cosell — and I caught on what’s changing in the Sales Playbook for 2022. An interim VP of Sales can work — if it’s done right.

Scale 309

Scale Sales Hiring Sales SMB 309

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2022

Dear SaaStr: How Many Sales Reps Do I Need? You can back into how many sales reps you’ll need in SaaS. Your VPs and Directors of Sales and sales ops and rev ops leaders and sales engineers are cost centers here. Assume 1 sales manager for each 8 sales professionals. 60% is OK, too. 2 Managers.

Scale 202

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Headcount 202

SaaStr

OCTOBER 20, 2023

20Dear SaaStr: My Top Sales Rep Made $600,000 a Year — And Just Quit! Why would a sales rep quit a job where they are making top 1%-5% money, respected, treated well, and have it dialed it? It may not be 100% logical, but looking back, here’s where I see it happen: A new VP of Sales comes in. The VP of Sales leaves.

Sales Recruiting 191

Sales Recruiting Sales Startup Engineering 191

Intercom, Inc.

FEBRUARY 16, 2018

I was curious to see how the company ensures that every new engineer has the opportunity to do the best job of their career, and how that would translate to my personal growth and everyday life in Intercom. Making an impact as an engineer. Setting engineers up for success. Everybody wants you to learn and contribute fast.

Engineering 177

Engineering Sales Hiring Scale Technology 177

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 16, 2016

What fraction of operating expense is spent on sales & marketing, and what fraction of op is spent on engineering? Most businesses spend 2x more on sales & marketing than engineering. Engineering receives about 17% of operating expense for the median SaaS company.

Engineering 100

Engineering Scale Startup Sales 100

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 18, 2020

Their goal is to build a cohesive revenue engine with ever-growing disjointed parts. That’s why I’ve built out the Revenue Engine Framework to help drive you to success. And it’s not just for CROs; if you’re a marketer, SDR, sales rep, manager, VP, or CRO, this one’s for you. Simple right?

Technical Review 121

Technical Review Development Team Review Systems Review Engineering 121

SaaStr

DECEMBER 16, 2020

We’ve talked a lot on SaaStr about how to make that critical hire: the VP Sales. You’ll end up with a crummy sales team under a mis-hire. We’ve posted a script to use when interviewing a VP Sales. And lessons learned on what a VP Sales really does. And the Great VP, Sales all know this from experience.

Sales Recruiting 293

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Sales Engineering 293

SaaStr

JANUARY 24, 2021

2021 will be the year SaaS sales evolves the most since the Appexchange ecosystem started to take off ~15 years ago, which spawned the entire notion of a true sales app stack. The permanent move to distributed sales teams. Almost every SaaS VP of Sales and CRO I’ve talked to in the past few months isn’t going back.

Sales Recruiting 346

Sales Recruiting Scale Technical Review Sales 346